This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of which lingers in the remembrance of all the literary and Sanskrit-reading portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody on, and the desecration of, the Sacred Mysteries and their Science. The rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a smaller scale. Finally, even the four “Adams” (symbolizing, under other names, the four preceding Races) were forgotten, and, passing from one generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, were at last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions: the first as the Tzelem, the “Shadow-Adam,” the Chhâyâs of our doctrine; the second, the “Model” Adam, the copy of the first, and the “male and female” of the exoteric Genesis; the third, the “Earthly Adam” before the Fall, an androgyne; and the fourth, the Adam after his “fall,” i.e., separated into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the Garden of Eden, or the forefather of our Race—the fifth—is an ingenious compound of the above four. As stated in the Zohar, Adam, the first Man, is not found now on Earth, he “is not found in all Below.” For where does the lower Earth come from? “From the Chain of the Earth, and from the Heaven Above,” i.e., from the superior Globes, those which precede and are above our Earth.
And there came out from it [the Chain] creatures differing one from the other. Some of them in garments [solid] (skins), some in shells (Q'lippoth), ... some in red shells, some in black, some in white, and some from all the colours.[1162]
As in the Chaldæan Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some treatises on the Kabalah speak of creatures with two faces, some with four, and some with one face; for “the highest Adam did not come down in all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives,” but is a mystery.
So is the Dragon a mystery. Truly says Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochaï, [pg 530] that to understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the “companions” (students, or Chelâs), but only to the “little ones,” i.e., the perfect Initiates.[1163]
The work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is only the little ones who understand the parable on the work in the Principium by the Mystery of the Serpent of the Great Sea.[1164]
And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their “Christ” was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who “shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein”; and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of the references to the “little ones” in the Gospels, relate to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the Talmud as the “little one.”
The “Mystery of the Serpent” was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the Great Sea, the “Sea of Life” having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphra Dtzenioutha speaks of Primeval Chaos and the Evolution of the Universe after a Destruction (Pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent:
Extending hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head twisting on its neck, it is enraged and angry.... It watches and conceals itself. Every thousand Days it is manifested.[1165]
A commentary on the Purânas says:
Ananta-Shesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is supposed to sleep during the intervals of the Daysof Brahmâ. The seven heads of Shesha support the Universe.